Special Issue: Fan Cultures and Cinephilia in Southeast Asian
Transmedia Contexts
Issue Editors: Wikanda Promkhuntong (wikanda.pro@mahidol.ac.th)
and Bertha Chin (bchin@swinburne.edu.my)
Responding to the shifting focus from audiences as consumers to their role
as cultural producers aided by various technological developments, fan studies have gained significant attention as a sub-field in media and film studies in the early 1990s. Despite extensive works that have shed light on fan practices surrounding Western
cultural products, limited accounts have paid attention to transcultural exchanges and fans within a specific regional context. Lori Morimoto and Bertha Chin’s work that put forward a theory of transcultural fandom (2013) points to the need to expand ways
of exploring fandom by engaging with alternative models of fan practices across different geographical contexts. This special issue seeks to extend further the discussion on fandom within a small but vibrant region of Southeast Asia, as well as Southeast Asia
in relation to other parts of the world.
Existing literature on cultural studies have begun to explore
how fans in different Southeast Asian countries have embraced and appropriated popular cultures, particularly pop music and television series from Japan and South Korea. Meanwhile, festival films from Southeast Asia have been discussed as part of the renewed
attention on global cinema and cinephilia studies. To address various practices within the increasingly transmedia cultures in the region, this special issue highlights the crossover between fans, cinephiles and other committed audience groups. Therefore,
we welcome a wide range of papers that seek to explore fans of various cultural products within the Southeast Asian context (i.e. film, music, television drama, video-game, animation and other transmedia content) and fans of different personalities (i.e. film
director, producer, star, idol, celebrity). Possible papers can focus on fan activities, as well as textual, aesthetics and performative aspects of fans/cinephiles.
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
- Fan vids/mashups/tributes/video essays and transformative works
in relation to Southeast Asian transmedia context - Fan re-enactments and performances in Southeast Asian context
- Fan meet-ups, fan clubs, cons and festivals in Southeast Asia
- Fan tourism/cinephile pilgrimage in Southeast Asia
- Crowd and fan funding in Southeast Asia context
- Fan subtitling and other activities as part of distribution
networks in Southeast Asia - The relationship between fans and producers/filmmakers/stars/idols
within Southeast Asia - Anti-fans and conflicts within Southeast Asian transmedia cultures
- Fan activism in Southeast Asian context
Submission details
can be found at
http://www.plarideljournal.org/information-for-authors/
Submissions are to be e-mailed to the Issue Editors and the
Managing Editor in MS Word format without any identifying information such as author(s) name and institutional affiliations. Authors should also submit a separate title page with the manuscript title, author name(s), institutional affiliation and contact information
for the corresponding author.
Deadline: 05 May 2017
The Fan Studies Network 
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